There is a lot of action from pens and inks in the world of technology these days and over the course of the past few months alone, we have seen a lot of ink dry on a variety of deals between companies in a bid to increase their scope, reach and also, help them attain common goals. Tesla has reportedly made contract with Samsung for the development of chips that would be used in its autonomous devices, the management of SanDisk has been contacted by HP Enterprise for the building of the memristor and other components that they might need for The Machine to become an actual thing and if this rumour is on the money, then we might be looking at a licensing between AMD Graphics and Intel which would allow the latter company use the Radeon cards produced by the former for its GPUs. In recent news, Microsoft does not want to be left out of this season of deals, and they are in agreement with QUALCOMM now, a partnership that would see the Windows 10 OS get ported to ARM devices by emulations.
Before now, we have been identifying the works of QUALCOMM in the sense of their chipsets (Snapdragons) in Android products, and with the ubiquitousness of this open source software on the market, it is no wonder that a lot of manufacturers here seek their services. Although not without its competitors too, they have managed to steal away the largest market share in the Android sphere and slowly, they might be looking at that same kind of good luck with PCs too. From this deal, we can expect to start seeing Qualcomm Snapdragon processors which would be optimized/ developed with support for PCs out of the box. From what has been said by company executives of both parties, they also wish to redefine the concept of cloud computing with this agreement.
It was not long ago that Microsoft tried to make Windows work some wonders on the ARM platform but was met with an absolute failure in the course of that experiment, basically, be cause the platform lacked applications to go on. Given how stubborn the Mountain View company is, this setback was not enough to make them let go, and they instead pushed forward, arriving at the conclusion that a native version of their latest Windows 10 being supported by the amazing Snapdragon processors from QUALCOMM could just be the thing to do the trick. While this is the full Windows 10 package and not some Windows RT lurking from around the corner, you would only be able to utilize it on 32-bit applications and Windows Universal Apps.
Taking a little amount of time to shine the spotlight on QUALCOMM, they are no slouch in this business and do know their way around when it comes to groundbreaking technology. Their chipsets were the first to provide support for both 3G and 4G connectivity options on smartphones and billions of other devices around the world. They are also working fast towards ensuring that they are the first to introduce the 5G support on their chipsets too, making them the prime candidate for Microsoft who also pride themselves in leading PC technology. Already, this union promises us some interesting prospects to look forward to.
In the coming years, we are set to start receiving a new wave and brand of Microsoft products that would not only be based on the PC technology but also, a number of tablets and notebooks that would incorporate the Qualcomm chipsets, giving Microsoft devices a better edge than before and also providing the chipset maker with an entry point into even newer markets than they were used to.
Truth be told, it is quite obvious that Microsoft stands to gain from this partnership the more because anyone that has been following the status of their set of Lumia devices would know that this series has been, at best, disappointing. Packing a lot of unwanted specs for the most of the time, carrying outdated chipsets and struggling to put the Windows mobile software on them again is not something that would readily appeal to tech enthusiasts and the idea that they would start to get high-end chips that could be used in their devices and actually support the OS that they are running means that they could just be ready for a turnaround in this regard.
For the first time in a lot of years, Microsoft could finally have struck a goldmine that would allow them get their nice products out there to the public and be able to give the entry level and low spending markets something that would truly be worth the spend. Being that the Surface tablets and notebook, as nice as they are, are being run as x86 personal computers, the reason for their high costs is not far-fetched at all but with ARM chipsets doing the business under the hood, prices would be slashed significantly.
On an ending note, it is worthy of note that the plan that both parties have in mind is to use Emulations as the primary porting mechanism and while this would create a new headache for QUALCOMM (as it did for Intel who ended up dumping the project), it would be a worthy challenge for a worthy contender and we would be waiting to reap the fruits of their research, and this partnership too.